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One of the arguments sometimes used to claim that blue is the best color is that blue is the only color with cards in the Power 9. Time Walk, Ancestral Recall, and Timetwister are certainly extremely broken. My question is, how powerful would cards of the other colors have to be to on the level of the Power 9? Does anyone have any idea?

That's a little tricky, since most of blue's power nine involve cheaply getting more cards in hand or taking extra turns. Those are clearly powerful advantages, but how strong they are can be difficult to directly compare to things like dealing damage, destroying permanents, reanimating dead creatures, or putting extra land on the battlefield.

Letting my ass take over here for a moment, it seems like the biggest advantage of cards like Ancestral Recall and Time walk is how much potential they have at any point in the game. An extra turn later in the game can help you secure a crushing lead or dig you out from under a bad situation, but an extra turn near the beginning of the game can be just as devastating, allowing you to set your board up unopposed or punishing what might otherwise be a minor misplay.

I guess in order for the other colors to have cards that approach the level of the Power 9 they would need to not only be inexpensive but offer in-color effects that remain useful regardless of when you cast them or what the board state looks like.

You would have to do something crazy like Entomb + Reanimate in one card for B or B1, which just seems stupid. The thing with Ancestral Recall and Time Walk is that they are so simple. You "just" draw cards, you "just" take an extra turn.

Or a Titanic Growth + Trample for G, or Swords to Plowshares without the life-part.

Ancestral Recall is an issue. Jace's Ingenuity at five mana isn't. Time Walk is an issue. Time Warp at five mana isn't. Time twister is considered to be power nine. Time Reversal isn't. Black Lotus costs more than a car. Gilded Lotus only gets played by Travis Woo.

So it's obviously not the effect itself that causes problems, but the cost of that effect. Taking an extra turn is not inherently broken, nor is drawing cards. But when those effects are too cheap, it makes them overly accessible. Not only does a player become able to play them as early as they like, but they also become able to play them along with other cards in the late game.

If you wanted to make cards on the power level of the P9 in other colors, I'd look at solid 5-6 mana spells and make them 1-2 mana, bam. For example:

Ancestral Law is outright broken. Unless somebody splashes white, it makes literally everything but lands unplayable. Even by power nine standards, it's ridiculous. I like it.

Ancestral Slaughter, contrastingly, is pretty weak by P9 standards. It's not much better than Terror, except that it penetrates Shroud / Hexproof. Bonkers in Standard, but looking at the crazy stuff in Vintage it barely even makes a splash.

Ancestral Flame might be just R to activate. Compare it with Scalding Devil and Shivan Hellkite. Take the best parts of both, and you get something that -might- be in the P9.

Oop. Didn't realize there was a card that already had it as cheap as 1R. I think just a 1:R ratio would infringe too much on fireball's design space.

You're right about Ancestral Slaughter. One of the tough things with these is that they can't just be balls-to-the-walls insanely powerful. They need to seem mildly believable. I could just make Ancestral Slaughter 'destroy each creature', but that's not just overpowered, it's obnoxious.

Honestly, I think the beauty in the Power 9 cards are their simplicity, and I can't think of anyway to 'improve' Ancestral Slaughter without going away from that.

I needed to clear this up for my friend, too. "Put a card in its owner's graveyard." doesn't specify any zone. You can put any card from any zone, hidden or otherwise, into its owner's graveyard. I really think it's perfect for a 'mox' ability because of how powerful it is in its simplicity.